'Juan' in this novel represents the quintessential saint and martyr, whereas the priest, in many ways, doesn't fulfil Catholic ideals of sainthood. How does Graham Greene use this contrast to question the very nature of martyrdom and sainthood?

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'Juan' in this novel represents the quintessential saint and martyr, whereas the priest, in many ways, doesn't fulfil Catholic ideals of sainthood. How does Graham Greene use this contrast to question the very nature of martyrdom and sainthood?         In The Power and the Glory, Greene presents us with a very unconventional protagonist: a fugitive whisky priest, the father of a bastard child, on the run from an overzealous lieutenant in a world where religion is illegal. Struggling to survive, he meets a scheming 'Mestizo', a 'Judas', who he knowingly follows into the hands of the lieutenant, and is subsequently executed. The novel examines the concepts of duty, persecution, compassion, and the idea of sainthood. The world of Mexico that Greene creates is a decaying, merciless, ungodly place, a place where one would not necessarily expect to find a typical saint. The storybook heroic saint in the novel, Juan, embodies all of the saintly stereotypes, whereas the priest does not. Greene is not interested in the typical, formulaic saint: he is far more concerned with the idea of finding spirituality in unexpected places, a good example of which is the prison scene.         The prison scene is presented by Greene as being a microcosm of the world: 'This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven'. This shows us Greene’s acceptance of the world, ‘overcrowded’ with inevitable human flaws, with the repetition of 'and' increasing the pace of reading, giving a tone of relentlessness. The word 'crime' linking the prison and the outside world implies that, just as the prison is full of criminals, so too is the world. 'Lust' is a reference to the pair copulating in the prison, and the wider implication of this is that the world is full of such lust, which Greene accepts, as we are but humans. Indeed, the priest himself succumbed to lust, in conceiving Brigitta, his illegitimate daughter. 'Unhappy love' in itself is an interesting binary pair, as one usually associates love with happiness; Greene is here subverting our expectations associated with the word 'love', perhaps suggesting that the archetypal connotations of love are often illusory.        The priest's time in prison also gives us an insight into his own views on martyrdom; when a prisoner suggests he is a martyr, he replies 'I don't think martyrs are like this... Martyrs are holy men'. The fact that he giggles first shows us that he's no Juan; giggling is a childish, unmanly thing to do. This shows us that he does not believe himself to be a holy man; he is 'in a state of mortal sin'. This is because he has fathered a bastard child, which fills him with a 'miserable happiness', reminiscent of the 'unhappy love' in the prison. He continues his self-deprecation, saying 'you must never think the holy martyrs are like me. I am a whisky priest'. His repeated use of the word ‘holy’, and his dissociation from it, shows that the priest is humble, modest, and aware that he is not the typical ‘holy man’. The fact that he accepts the ‘whisky priest’ label, whilst avoiding the label of 'martyr' shows that he is modest, but also encourages the reader to question the nature of martyrdom; could a whisky priest also be a martyr?         A martyr, or saint, in the priest's eyes should see beauty in suffering: 'Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I.' This is regarding the people having sex in the prison, when he is discussing it with the 'pious woman'. He says he is a 'bad priest' and knows 'from experience – how much beauty Satan carried'. That he acknowledges beauty
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in sin goes against traditional Catholic ideals regarding sin; he has a more realistic attitude to life, discarding the idealistic view of sin as being ugly, accepting that it can be beautiful. Of course, Greene is subtly implying that the priest does possess saintly qualities, in that he knows what a saint should see. Indeed, even though he doesn't find beauty in suffering here, he finds peace, clarity and an 'irrational affection for the inhabitants of the prison': love.         Love is something the priest values highly, and in the religious sense love is paramount. It is notable that 'in his ...

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